Answered

"Humanoid Bone Already Defined" when trying to assign a new character to a project

adamgryu 4 years ago updated by Peter - Soxware Developer 3 years ago 8

When I try to assign a new character to the project to edit, I get this error. How can I get around this?

Furthermore, is it possible to delete or hide the properties I'm not using in the dopesheet view?

UMotion Version:
1.20
Unity Version:
2019.2

Answer

Answer
Answered

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

A UMotion project is per character. So if you want to animate a new character, please create a new UMotion project for it.

"Furthermore, is it possible to delete or hide the properties I'm not using in the dopesheet view?"

Yes, you can do this via Config Mode. When you select a bone/transform, you can set it's Visibility to "Lock". That is going to hide it in the Scene View and in the Clip Editor. You can also hide only certain properties of a bone (position/rotation/scale) via the "Properities" drop-down field:

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Answer
Answered

Hi,
thank you very much for your support request.

A UMotion project is per character. So if you want to animate a new character, please create a new UMotion project for it.

"Furthermore, is it possible to delete or hide the properties I'm not using in the dopesheet view?"

Yes, you can do this via Config Mode. When you select a bone/transform, you can set it's Visibility to "Lock". That is going to hide it in the Scene View and in the Clip Editor. You can also hide only certain properties of a bone (position/rotation/scale) via the "Properities" drop-down field:

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter

Is there an easy way to share animations between multiple characters or models and animate them in the same project?

Unity's humanoid animation system is designed for animation re-targeting (i.e. sharing the animation). Usually the animation is created for one character (in UMotion or any other 3D modeling application like Blender or Maya...), then it is exported to *.anim or *.fbx and then used on multiple characters.

More information about how this works: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/05/26/mecanim-humanoids/

Best regards,
Peter

Is there a way to quickly switch a character?

I have a uMotion project with many clips. I use the same rig across all my characters (as humanoid) but it still complains about "Spine" already being defined. I'm not sure if this is supported, the rigs are 100% the same?

If it's not how would you transfer all the clips from a project to a new one?

I don't have the source GameObject (character) I first used to create the project.... :'(

If the character has exactly the same rig (all bones are named the same and at the same place in the hierarchy without any extra parents etc.), UMotion would believe it is the same character and shouldn't throw this messages. Please verify that your rig really has the same transform hierarchy.

Best regards,
Peter

I had two other characters in this project and deleted them but I still get his error.

Does this mean like previously stated that I have to start a new project for every character and use the same project to swap out different models?

Does this mean like previously stated that I have to start a new project for every character and use the same project to swap out different models?

It's one UMotion project per character. You can not use the same UMotion project for multiple characters, that won't work/won't make sense from a technical point of view as character A has different bones/bone lengths/initial bone orientations etc. than character B.

If you want to re-use animations between characters, you can use Unity's humanoid animation system which handles the animation re-targeting for you (i.e. transferring animation of character A onto character B). Just create your humanoid animation on character A and export it. Then you can use the animation on character B. Please note that animation re-targeting always comes with quality trade-offs.

More information on animation re-targeting: https://blog.unity.com/technology/mecanim-humanoids

Please let me know in case you have any follow-up questions.

Best regards,
Peter